Breaking the Language Barrier

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A look inside Square Enix's busy localisation department.

By Dave McCarthy

Ever wondered why you have to wait quite so long to play games that have been out in Japan for years? It's because turning Japanese into English – and French, and German, and Spanish, and Italian – takes a little bit of time. A little bit of time and a fair amount of effort. But those efforts have been getting better: the days of 'All your base are belong to us', are well finished now. Instead companies are enlisting the help of Harvard-educated literary translators like Jay Rubin, who took time out from translating the likes of leading Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, to work on Microsoft's Lost Odyssey. Companies like Square Enix are taking localisation to a new level.

Take Final Fantasy Tactics, for example. The original US release, on PSone, was well-loved in every respect but one: the translation of the dialogue and story. By contrast, the recent PSP version received nothing but praise for the quality of its localisation. Partly, that represents the growth in size of Square's localisation department. During the era of the original PlayStation, that department was small and inexperienced. With every successive western release, its size and experience has increased. Now it incorporates experts in American English, British English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, not to mention project management to make sure every project comes in on time and to budget. What's more, having built up this network of translation experts, the company can use the same group of translators to work on all the titles in a particular series (such as Ivalice Alliance, which includes Final Fantasy XII, Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions, and Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings).

Square is aiming for closer global releases on future titles, with World Ends With You leading the way.

"We've made huge progress in our translation and localisation methods, processes and quality in the decade since FF Tactics was launched," says Square Enix's localisation production manager, Seb Ohsan Berthelsen. "A lot of early localisation work for most Japanese developers was fairly rudimentary and consisted in getting games with some sort of English text for the non-Japanese market. As an industry, we had to do an awful lot of catching up on this front to ensure that great games weren't let down by weak translations. We've been fortunate in that the localisation department in our head office in Tokyo has really pushed for a very high standard of localisation on all our titles since it was set up and it's been a constant process of refinement, improvement and learning from our mistakes ever since."

That process of refinement has been made possible because the excellent localisation on display in more recent Square Enix titles also reflects a more outward-looking philosophy on the part of the company as a whole. Like many other Japanese publishers and developers, Square Enix sees overseas market as a crucial component of the company's growth. At the end of last year, Senior Vice President Michihiro Sasaki told the Financial Times that the company aims to generate half of its revenues outside of Japan (it currently makes 10 to 20 percent from overseas markets). More recently, CEO, John Yamamoto expressed a desire to acquire at least one Western development studio, and company president Yoichi Wada told a Japanese newspaper that the company aims to make simultaneous releases the norm.

Revenant Wings, for example, was designed from the outset with western markets in mind, to build on the global success of Final Fantasy XII. Hence the RTS game design and simple story. Nevertheless, the game was still fine-tuned for foreign markets: the Japanese version, for example, was easier than its western counterpart, because the RTS genre is not a well-known one in Japan. "When we brought it over to the overseas markets, North America and Europe, since the RTS genre as a whole is more popular and people are more accustomed to it, we wanted to adjust the balance to make it something that would appeal to people who are already more familiar with it," explains the game's producer, Eisuke Yokoyama. Thus the gambit system was fine-tuned to make the enemies behave more like human players, and more content was added, such as the Midnight Deep Dungeon, full of nastier monsters and harder enemies. (Dragon Quest Swords was similarly enhanced for western audiences, acquiring a series of more difficult challenges after the main quest.)

Revenant Wings was made more difficult for the Western market.

That also goes to show that the localisation process extends well beyond language. There are technical issues, like optimising games for different formats and systems – although the arrival of high definition gaming renders this less of an issue than during the days of PAL vs. NTSC, when talk of borders and 60Hz modes used to be common (back when Capcom was forced to bow to pressure from gamers who demanded that the company implement 60Hz modes in the PAL versions of its games, in fact). There are also legal issues to consider: the best translation of Subarashiki Kono Sekai is something along the lines of 'It's a Wonderful World', but the game was released in the west as The World Ends With You, because other variations had already been copyrighted. And there are cultural issues to consider: videogame characters from Lara Croft to Crash Bandicoot have been redesigned to increase their appeal for Japanese audiences. That's not a route that Square Enix intends to follow, however. "One thing we don't do is to make any radical changes to the story, the characters or the look of the game," says Berthelsen. "They form an integral part of the game creator's vision. In any case, our games tend to deal with very universal themes – love, loss, betrayal, the search for one's identity and so on."